Written by Mark MacNamara. Originally: "Dialog With Stone," a traveler's digression begun in 2004, with entries From Africa, Europe and North America. Now: a ramble-jam through the countryside of American culture, high and low, real and imagined.

Aug 12, 2014

This is the other problem with suicide. First, you give up your life for a pittance, the cost of a few flimsy synapses gone awry. Then you undermine everybody else. You put a fine Moorish arch on a cave-like little doubt. And, frankly, it becomes another key hole for the wrong key. Of course, it's the last thing on your mind when you're beyond recall, when you're gathering your belongings, whatever thoughts those might be... That's the problem, particularly in this case, with someone so beloved. Is that too strong? Cherished, certainly... The problem is that you set the trap for others also at wit's end, a gossamer away... "My God, if he gave in, what hope have I?"

But then by strokes of luck, completely out of the blue, you make your way into the dark, that lovely blackening, to your movie seat, to watch Calvary, the new Irish film by John Michael McDonough, best known for The Guard. Starring Brendon Gleeson, in this film as well. First, a cop; now a priest. Written and directed by McDonough, which is always a wrong for some filmmakers I know, who insist you must never direct your own script.

But discard inside double-A baseball: here you become the old, wise, once-married priest, in the hell realms, in amongst demons, all thoroughly possessed. Each by turns renounces your church, your priesthood and you. And finally, there is no escape and you are stuck with your integrity. In the end, your sad fate is that you do care for your flock, and not to fuck, and as fucked up as they may be. And so you grasp your Christlike moment, you endure that, it's your fate and desire, although suicide by any other name.

Still, the story rings true, even if the faith in that story is not enough to save you. Even you. No solace that somebody already did what you're doing, to save you from it. That's the real problem, you have to know what you're doing at a moment like that, but how could you. That's the absurdity.

But if you care to see it that way, if you're willing to stop watching the waves break and just walk home, then it's enough to get you through another day. You just wish the poor man, with all of his dexterity, had seen it, seen the nature of true demon possession and how ephemeral that is, and how hopeful faith can be, not religious faith, but human faith, all that was born in the bang, the slime, the cave paintings, all of it.